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Product Description

Platform: PC

Product Description

The world has been ravaged by a series of climatic disasters and society is on the verge of total breakdown. Now the aliens have returned, with a full invasion force bent on nothing less than the total annihilation of mankind, starting by trying to rip the heart out of Earth’s most iconic city. In New York, terrifying alien invaders stalk the streets and a nightmare plague strikes down the city’s myriad inhabitants with brutal epidemic speed. The city’s systems are in chaos, its streets and skyline are smashed and in flaming ruin. This is New York City like you’ve never seen it before.

Amazon.com

Crysis 2 is the sequel to one of the greatest PC first-person shooters yet created. Featuring futuristic war, gorgeous destruction and the chance to kick alien butt on the grandest stage of all, New York City, Crysis 2 is destined at the least to equal its predecessor, if not surpass it. Additional features include: challenging AI enemies in the single player campaign, 12-player support online, new and improved upgradable Nanosuit 2 technology and more.

Story

The world has been ravaged by a series of climatic disasters and society is on the verge of total breakdown. Now the aliens have returned, with a full invasion force bent on nothing less than the total annihilation of mankind, starting by trying to rip the heart out of Earth's most iconic city.

In New York, terrifying alien invaders stalk the streets and a nightmare plague strikes down the city's myriad inhabitants with brutal epidemic speed. The city's systems are in chaos, its streets and skyline are smashed and in flaming ruin. This is New York City like you've never seen it before. Neither paramilitary law enforcement nor the might of the US military machine can stand against the invaders, and all who choose not to flee are dead men walking. Just to survive in this maelstrom of death will require technology beyond anything any modern soldier has ever seen.

Yet one man will inherit that means to survive. One supersoldier, wielding the combat enhancement technology of the future with Nanosuit 2, will make the last stand to save humanity from destruction in the urban jungle that is New York City.

Key Game Features

New York New York - Crysis set the visual benchmark for PC games that still stands today. Crysis 2 redefines the benchmark on console and PC platforms, shifting their attention to the rich urban jungle of New York City.

Amazing Aliens and AI - Challenging best-in-class AI with unique group coordination and group behavior systems which give realistic responses to your actions.

I will just come right out and say it: Crysis 2 is terrible and typifies everything wrong with PC gaming today. I say this as a huge fan of the original Crysis and Crysis Warhead, which were two of my favorite games. In fact, I just played them both over the weekend on Delta difficulty in preparation for Crysis 2. Despite selling over three million units of the original Crysis on PC, Crysis 2 was clearly developed for consoles first and PC second. This review assumes that you played and enjoyed the original Crysis, and may not be as useful to someone unfamiliar with the series.

The review system here includes two GTX 480 in SLI, a i7 920 @ 4.1 ghz, and a 2560x1600 monitor.

***GRAPHICS***The graphics were one of the main strengths of the original game, and Crysis 2 has turned them into a weakness. There are NO configuration options, just preset settings, and you can only choose from "High," "Very High," and "Extreme." Unfortunately, Extreme looks significantly worse than Crysis and Warhead. Protip for Crytek: calling your graphics "extreme" doesn't make them look any better. As far as I can tell there is no way to force Anti-Aliasing on, and instead Crysis 2 uses its own form of edge blurring that looks terrible compared to true AA. The edge AA was fine in Crysis because the vegetation benefited from it more than traditional AA and it provided a performance boost, but Crysis 2 consists of mostly buildings and straight edges that require traditional AA to look their best.

There are three main pillars to the graphical failings.

----The textures are a major downgrade. It's true that the original Crysis had the occasional blurry rock texture, but most of them were flat out amazing. Crysis 2 throws all that away and replaces them with textures that are very flat and low resolution, failing to make effective use of ambient occlusion like the original game did. The textures now look closer to what you'll find in the very dated looking Call of Duty games than the original Crysis.

----The visual effects are a major downgrade. Crysis 2 shipped as a DirectX9 game, whereas the original Crysis was built in DirectX 10 and it shows. The explosions, motion blur, and particle effects were of amazing quality in Crysis and judiciously used, but on the other hand Crysis 2 tries to obscure the lower quality effects by using them excessively. The motion blur and bloom lighting in Crysis 2 are absolutely out of control. In Crysis, the motion blur was used to good effect by making a demanding game run a bit smoother and also making flying objects look great when they passed in front of you. Crysis 2 is not a demanding game, and rather than using high quality blur on objects for the wow factor, it slathers low quality blur over every inch of the screen when you turn to distract you from the rest of the graphics. I could go down the list point by point listing things like water effects, SSAO, lower godrays count, etc and explaining how they are downgraded in Crysis 2, but that would make the review run too long.

----The environments are a major downgrade. Crysis featured complex, wide open jungle environment with a lot of destructibility and interactivity, and amazing shadows casted by all of the plants. When you blew something up, the explosions would ripple through the tree leaves, shaking them. Crysis 2 throws all of that away in favor of a city environment that features a much lower draw distance, much lower polygon count, and far fewer shadows. The environments of Crysis 2 are very small and restrictive, with minimal opportunities to explore or deviate from the set path.

Aside from the three key complaints above, the config files are locked which will come as a huge dissapointment to Crysis fans. The config culture of the original Crysis was a blast, with the different looks you could give the game providing reason to revisit it. In short, Crysis 2 looks worse than the aging Crysis, and roughly in line with the average recent PC release. It does look nice in screenshots, but play it on a large monitor and you'll see that many assets are of shockingly low quality.

***STORY***I will not say much about the story of Crysis 2 because I do not want to spoil it (***original Crysis spoilers incoming***). However, know that while Crysis 1 featured an epic cliffhanger ending with NOMAD and Prophet returning to the nuked island to continue the fight, Crysis 2 throws all of that away to go with a different main character and different setting. This was a huge mistake and a slap in the face to Crysis fans, and was probably done because Crytek wanted to cater to the console gamers who did not play Crysis by giving them a fresh start and rebooted plot.

***GAMEPLAY***The gameplay also features huge concessions caused by the console-centric development. Almost immediately, you will notice that game-saves have been removed in favor of a console-style checkpoint system. This is bad because Crytek doesn't do a good job of spacing its checkpoints. There have been times where I have cleared an area of enemies, received a radio transmission and new objective, then moved on to a new area only to die and be put back at the *very* start of all that. Most games would put a checkpoint after you've completed an objective, but Crysis 2 often doesn't, which is quite annoying in a game that has more than its fair share of cheap deaths.

The levels have been vastly decreased in size as well as enemy count, taking away the sandbox feel. Crysis 2 now plays like your typical on-rails, scripted, Call of Duty game. The enemy soldiers you fight are now generic and *ultra-serious*, a far cry from the humor of stalking the hapless and hilarious North Koreans of the original Crysis through the jungle. Vehicles also fall by the wayside and are used much less even though the strategic options they offered were a strength of the original Crysis. Think you're going to hop in an APC and mow enemies down with the turret like you did with Crysis 1 jeeps? Think again, you'll be ripped to shreds by enemies in a matter of seconds because they are extremely accurate even over long distances.

The opening of the game is hugely consolized to the point that it's an embarrassment. You watch video cutscene after video cutscene and then are thrown into an on-rails tutorial level where the nanosuit stops you every 3 seconds to troll for its various features. When I finally got to control my character and saw that SLI wasn't working, exiting out of the game to fix it and then restarting made me rewatch the unskippable cutscenes. By contrast, in Crysis you jump out of a plane and get to start playing, and it is a real level rather than the obligatory "tutorial level" common to console games.

The nanosuit has also seen some huge downgrades to make it easier to use with an Xbox 360 controller. Speed mode and strength mode are no longer selectable. Instead, they automatically kick in when you run or jump. This is a huge design flaw, because there will be many occasions where you want to run without draining your suit power and you can no longer do that. Even worse, the "speed" running in Crysis 2 is barely faster than normal running in Crysis 1. Any time you want to move faster than a walk, you are draining your armor. The armor mode is no longer the default suit mode when you run out of energy and need to replenish. Instead, all suit modes are turned off, and in fact when armor mode is turned on it drains your energy even if you aren't taking damage. This makes the main character of Crysis 2 much weaker than NOMAD and Psycho, and that combined with the tiny environments means even someone who mastered Crysis will get mauled in this game on the harder difficulties. The enemies have solid AI, but they are prone to glitches and can sometimes see you through walls and cover when they should not have line of sight. The only real improvement in Crysis 2 is that you can now pull yourself up on to ledges, which is a welcome addition. Another new feature is that holding the right mouse button when near the edge of a wall or crouched behind a barrier will allow you to peek out and shoot. For some reason it does not work with the vast majority of the environment though, so it can't be relied on and you'll quickly learn to ignore it.

To "compensate" for the many downgrades, Crysis features the timeless console trope of Collectible Dogtags! Because collectable dogtags were what we all wanted and not DX11, tweakable graphics, sandbox gameplay, and a true sequel to Crysis.

***MULTIPLAYER***I saved the multiplayer for last because I did not play it in the original Crysis and have only played it in the demo of Crysis 2. There is not much to say about it though. It features small maps, low player counts, Call of Duty style killstreaks, an annoying lobby system, and rampant hacking. You already know if that type of game interests you or not. Assuming you aren't in the target audience for this, I would suggest the excellent Battlefield Bad Company 2.

***BUGS***Crysis 2 is not a broken game, but there are many embarrassing bugs that should have never passed QA. With moderate frequency, dying and reloading a checkpoint will disable your melee attacks entirely, causing nothing to happen when you press the melee button. The only way to fix this is quitting the game and restarting. I have also seen this bug reported by several others. Several times, the crosshairs of my gun scope have disappeared entirely, possibly caused by reloading checkpoints or alt-tabbing. Again, this can only be fixed by restarting the game as far as I know. Lastly, my gun disappeared entirely once, although switching weapons restored it.

***CONCLUSION***If Crysis 2 had been marketed under a different name or was a totally new IP, I might have been able to give it two stars. It is at its core a below average and utterly forgettable FPS. However, Crysis 2 is not a random game, it is the sequel to Crysis, and must be judged in comparison to the original. As a sequel to Crysis, it fails spectacularly, offering massive downgrades and concessions to cater to consoles rather than improvements to the original. In short, Crysis fans now have their Command & Conquer 4. Amazon describes the criteria for one star reviews as "I hate it," and boy do I hate both this game and everything it represents to dedicated PC gaming.Read more ›

This is a single player only review... I couldn't care less about multi-player.

I am going to try to rate this as a stand-alone game because comparing it to the others is like comparing "The Godfather" to "The Godfather 3" There is no comparison. The first ones were better in every way, save for maybe the musical score.

I am a fan of the first two games in the series, Crysis and Crysis:Warhead, the amount of vehicles and a totally open world and all manner of community support and mod development, not forgetting to mention that the first game was, in my opinion, EPIC. It took me a full week worth of time to beat them and I loved them... Still do. It was quite fun with the amount of things you could do. Nothing beat getting to jump out of the water in stealth mode and then go into maximum power mode and punch bad guys, literally LAUNCHING them off cliffs or 80 feet into the air or against a fully destructible seaside shack building... Or shooting out the front tire of a hummer full of bad guys bearing down on you and causing it to flip and roll throwing everyone out of it... Head shots were so very satisfying... If I shot a guy in the leg, he would limp. The A.I. was amazing. The graphics are amazing, still, and the first two games are STILL used as benchmarks for high-end PCs. It was what a PC game should be, hardcore mouse and keyboard WITH optional, and flawless support for a PC Xbox-360 controller for the more laid back gamers... Made for the PC and THEN ported to the lesser console systems.

Before I rant here... I'll say this is a surprisingly good shooter among the offers up around the same time of its release. I cannot say much anything bad if rating it as a stand-alone game with no previous entries.... So it is all kinds of awesome....

Buuuuuuuuuuuut...

That is not the case here... Whenever a company makes a series of games, they should ALWAYS out-do the game that came before... Bigger and better... That is what sells and brings back customers in a game series... This is not the case here. In fact.... I have to say WTF??? Did EA fire the original development crew and designers again or something? Is Crytek still on cruise control off the first two games and think that nobody would notice a bunch of things missing?

First off... Compared to the previous games open world environments, this game is more of a corridor shooter, though there is the illusion of lots of space, this game is what I would call Bi-Level Linear, as in, it pretty much gives you only two major options to approaching most situations... Go in the front door, or sneak around back. You cannot backtrack like the previous games as this one loads level by level and you really are just nudged forward and rarely ever revisit any place.

The A.I. characters are now dumb as bricks, instead of going on high alert when one of their own drops dead in front of them, they just keep walking around like nothing happened. Whereas in the original games the A.I. would even notice the visual distortion your cloaking made if you got too close, or would go on high alert if they found a body. Though on higher difficulties they become a bit less forgiving. Also... I have a problem with the more arcade-like feel of the bad guys in this game, you literally have to empty a full clip into each one to drop them and they don't seem to act as "wounded" like in the first games... On harder difficulty settings, each enemy acts like they are wearing the same super suit as you.

Vehicles... VERY disappointing... Because of this games linear, corridor type set up, you probably won't even use them if you see them sitting around... All TWO of them, an unarmed Hummer thing and a standard FPS APC thing. Where as the first games, you got to control the vehicles from the cockpit, seeing the steering wheel and gauges and everything, sort of like far cry 2, so it didn't break the immersion of the game when in vehicles. In Crysis 2 it just goes to a standard 3rd person, outside the vehicle view and just feels too arcade like. And when you DO need to drive a vehicle, it is in only a straight line because there often isn't even enough room to turn around and everything behind you "conveniently" collapses and such.

Weapons... Surprisingly similar to the first two games... In fact, I was quite happy with the selection and the ability to hot-swap mods on the weapons like laser sights and scopes and silencers. One of the things they kept from the first games. Though the fact I had to unload tons of ammo into every bad guy, made the guns feel more like I was trying to take down a mugger with a BB gun.

Keyboard and mouse Vs. Controller... This game is not like the first two where they were made for PC first and THEN ported to console. Nope... This one is pretty much only good with an Xbox-360 controller, though I cannot be too critical about that since I actually like having controller support on PC and prefer the analog controls and more laid back playing with a controller over being stooped over the keyboard and getting carpal tunnel. So I give it a great rating with the controller integration.

Graphics... Well... Um... Ouch... It actually DOWNGRADES to Direct X9! The first two games were some of the first to fully utilize DX10. Now with DX11 out, I would have expected a game with this kind of PC following would try to push the envelope again... But nope... It is pretty much a direct port from the consoles, where most the consoles can only run DX9, and it shows. Though the graphics are pretty damn good for a twice outdated engine, I guess it is the best that can be done with DX9 and there are "rumors" of a patch coming to add DX10 and DX11 support for the PC eventually...

Story... While the story isn't as epic as the first two games, it is quite good compared to the other FPS offerings around the time of this games release. It gave me quite a few, "WOW!" and "DUDE LOOK AT THAT!" Moments, and it felt quite satisfying by the end. Though I do wish the single player campaign was a few hours longer... I'm getting rather tired of games constantly getting shorter and shorter.

Music... ABSOLUTELY ASTONISHING!!! But that is mainly because they tapped Hans Zimmer for the main theme and score that is heard throughout the game... The opening movie and the theme are quite memorable after you see it.

But damn... I just cannot get over the fact that I can no longer punch the bad guys across the room anymore, or jump down from a height and pretty much squish a baddy. Or drive a massive army truck up to an enemy camp, run into 3 guys, getting them stuck on the front with the awesome physics of the first two games, jump out of the truck while it is still rolling and then watch it and the baddies plummet off a cliff to a nice fiery crash at the bottom of the cliff. That is what made the first two games so much fun, because if you had the imagination for it, you could do all kinds of fun things.

Replay value.... Next to none... It just feels too scripted.

The bottom line... And I wouldn't admit this about most EA games lately... I did not feel like I got too ripped off... Though it might just be the Hans Zimmer soundtrack that got me hooked... It creates such a great environment in the game that I'm willing to not be overly nit-picky about all the things this game lacks compared to the original two.

It IS linear... But not to the point where you can't explore a little. I think game companies need to understand this... That people like getting rewarded for exploring off the beaten path instead of being herded like cattle down a one way street.

Now for the honesty from a fan of the original Crysis games... STOP MAKING GAMES THAT ARE CALL OF DUTY or HALO CLONES!!!!!!! One is enough... Just because Call Of Duty made more money than James Cameron's Avatar movie does not mean ALL gamers want to only ever play games like that one in the future.Read more ›

A Disappointment and a step back for PC gaming and the original Crysis. All hemmed in like Darksiders, no more free roaming, no more Gamesaves anywhere, it is now a console game by EA.

Edit:My beef is not on the graphics but the gameplay.

What is wrong with 'Consolitis'?The linearity. This game now runs on Rails.You might as well rename it Time-Crysis. Shoot off-screen or aim to screen-edges to reload. What next EA? Insert quarters for time extensions?

There are also convenient Ammo Dumps for you. Gone are when the Artificial Intelligence has enemies ganging up to flush you out. Their grenade tosses? LOL. Every obstacle shielding you is blast-proof.

They have watered down the A-Grade Crysis, peeled off the brand and slapped it on another bottle. An inferior product.

In my humble opinion, the original Crysis to this day remains one of the best FPS of all time for so many reasons that I couldn't possibly list them all. There are some obvious ones, graphics, realistic game-play, enemy A.I., lush environments, non-linearity, destructible environments, etc. But one of the things that's not so obvious is the following: Most video games that I can think of start one off at the very bottom; little to no items, weapons, upgrades, abilities, etc., etc. You basically have to build your character from the ground up and near the end of the game you become this real bad @ss. The original Crysis completely shattered this formula. In that game, you started off with everything on the nano suit unlocked, fully powered, and ready for immediate use. In other words, you were a complete bad @ss right from the beginning.

In the first couple of levels no one has a real chance against you. You really are completely superior to anything the game throws your way; and this makes total sense because that's what the nano suit is for, to make you superior in every way to your enemies. And this is not to say the game was easy, because it wasn't. It just meant that if you used your brain and all of the resources at your disposal, you were virtually invincible because again, that's what the nano suit is all about. I recall climbing into the back of a jeep and taking control of a chain gun and attempting to mow down some enemies when all of a sudden a tall palm tree realistically falls down and instantly kills some of the enemies I had missed. I soon realized that I HAD unintentionally caused this to happen because my gun fire caused the tree to fall, and as a gamer, this was a MIND BLOWING moment that cannot be replicated in Crysis 2. In the original Crysis, if you were in a vehicle and an enemy shot at your tires, the tires actaully went flat and the vehicle was disabled. I mean, you cannot find gameplay as simple and realistic as this is any generic shooter the current day.

So this is why I had to buy Crysis 2 on day one, because I have so many fond memories of the original Crysis. But I have to admit I've made a grave mistake. You see, Crysis 2 is INFERIOR in every way to the original Crysis. Others reviewers have already mentioned it but it begs repeating, making Crysis 2 for PC a console port was a mistake of EPIC proportions. Crysis 2 doesn't feel like Crysis, it doesn't taste like Crysis, it doesn't smell like Crysis. The graphics are worse than the original. There are NO detailed settings adjustments to be made. Every time your aim changes, there this horrifying, choppy blur on the screen. The weapons are very inaccurate. Helicopter's spot and shoot you even when you're cloaked. I walked into this new area cloaked, and about a dozen enemy soldiers showed up near my position stating that I had been "seen" in the area. Really? I'm cloaked remember. This would have been impossible in the original Crysis because being cloaked meant something in that game. There are about six ammo dumps in every area, not to mention that enemy ammo drops, making it impossible to run out of ammo, or even a need to conserve and that gives this game a tremendous "arcade-like" and unrealistic feel. The nano suit is a terrible downgrade from the original and actually makes you a much weaker character. One example is when you use max armor. In this game, you actually lose suit energy even if you're not taking damage. In the original, the energy decreased ONLY when you took on enemy fire, which again, makes much more sense and offered greater realism.

You want to know what is the worst thing of all, the nano suit actually TELLS you what to do. It treats you like the dumbest person on the planet that is incapable of thinking for yourself. As a gamer, this is insulting beyond description. Personally, I want to be able to use my brain in order to assess the situation, come up with an effective strategy, and implement that strategy as a spec ops soilder would in real combat. In the words of Clint Eastwood (Heartbreak Ridge), I want to IMPROVISE, ADAPT, and OVERCOME. I'm a grown man, I don't need my hand held especially in a game like this where you're supposed to man-up, after all, you're the savior and hero remember?

The more I write this review, the more disgusted I'm getting with this game, seriously. ANYONE who thinks this is even a decent game has never played the original. No more Call of Duty clone garbage for me, it's over. With the exception of Uncharted 3 and Battlefield 3, I'm done with all of other shooters.Read more ›